tl;dr missing drivers I'm including more background than may be necessary in case I'm overlooking something - the meat of the issue is under the bold below.

I recently did a clean install of Windows 10 Home on my mother's old desktop, which had been running Vista (also Home, I believe). Despite the computer's age, almost all of the hardware is cooperating (except the internal speakers being inaccessible for playback, which is no big deal, and a slight hiccup and a couple beeps during POST, which I may end up posting about separately later).

The biggest problem I've run into is that the computer will no longer see the Lexmark x5270 (which was chugging along perfectly well with Vista) as an available printer. It does recognize that the device has been plugged into the USB port, and if I go into Devices and Printers (Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Devices and Printers), a Lexmark 5200 Series shows up. It does not, however, show it as an available printer when trying to print a document. If I go into the device properties, it shows that there are no drivers installed, and no compatible drivers available. Going through the troubleshooting options yields the same result.

We still have the old installation cd for the printer, so I popped that in and went through their installation steps - no difference. I checked out the Lexmark website, and they stopped driver support after Windows XP - I assume the printer must have been running in compatibility mode with Vista, but I didn't set it up so I don't know for sure. None of the driver clearinghouse websites had any updates that I could find, either.

So to recap, I'm now apparently sitting on a perfectly functional but entirely useless printer because the last driver update was four OSes ago.Is there any way around this, or am I going to have to look for a new printer this week?

Was the old Vista installation 32-bit? 32-bit Windows drivers are fundamentally incompatible with 64-bit versions. If that's the case then the driver might still cooperate with the 32-bit version of Windows 10. (The principal disadvantage is that 32-bit versions are restricted to 3 GB of RAM.)

That's unfortunately not something it ever occurred to me to check, and since it was a clean install from the little Windows 10 thumbdrive, it didn't try to guide me to one installation or the other to match the previous installation (I went with 64-bit). I do know that the Vista installation had both C:\Program Files and C:\Program Files (x86) folders, though, so I assume it was 64-bit. But as far as I can tell, Windows 10 compatibility mode doesn't go as far back as XP, so even if the driver was 64-bit that may not really get me anywhere, practicably speaking?

This may be* a naive question, but is there any chance I could plug the printer directly into her router (Linksys E1000) and somehow use it as a network printer, or is every computer that connects to it still going to need the drivers? I don't know if routers can install and handle drivers on their own.